Motor driven microgrippers are known in the prior art and are exemplified by the microgripper disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,332,275 with respect to which the applicant of the present application is an inventor. The '275 patent discloses a microgripper construction which is difficult and expensive to manufacture and which relies upon pins sliding along the exterior of gripper arms to close the arms on a component to be gripped. Quite apart from the difficulty and expense of manufacturing the '275 microgripper, the gripper disclosed in that patent does not perform satisfactorily due to the operating pins sliding on the exterior of the leaf spring gripper arms, which by their nature, tend to have surface imperfections which render smooth operation of the gripper impossible or difficult to achieve utilizing normal manufacturing techniques. The imperfections on the gripper arms may appear small, but due to the ratio of the distance from the gripper arm supports to the imperfections relative to the distance from the gripper arm supports to the component gripping surfaces, any imperfection in the surface of the arm, which the operating pins come into contact with, is greatly magnified at the gripper component surfaces so that a one or two mil. defect can be magnified to become an undesirable ten or twenty mil. movement at the component gripper surfaces of the arms. Such imperfection is detrimental to the commercial success of microgrippers, as is disclosed in the '275 patent, in the world of ever increasing precision required in the gripping and placing of ever smaller components.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a microgripper which overcomes the shortcomings of the '275 patent as set forth above, while being less expensive and easier to produce on a commercial scale.